Seven Chakras
by Saber Girls
Summary: My response to the Seven Chakras challenge on LJ, with occasional lime, for the Zuko x Katara claim. Premise: Zuko sided with Aang and Katara under Ba Sing Se. Azula still won.
1. Survival

Disclaimer: Let's make a few things very clear:

1. I do not own Avatar, and make no profit from this fanfiction.

2. I _do not consider this to be NC-17_. I consider it to be a hard R/M. If you feel I'm wrong, please message me rather than reporting me, and I'll take down the story. I honestly don't think this qualifies as more explicit than, say, the sex scenes in _Highlander_. If you do, just tell me, and I'll take it off the site. No harm, no foul.

3. If I feel a later chapter _does_ go beyond the scope of an R/M rating, I will not be posting it here, but will post a link to it in my profile.

4. This disclaimer applies to all chapters.

And now the story!

--  
Survival

She feels the full moon pulling at her and knows she is still alive. He feels the sun rising and knows he isn't dead. This is how Katara awakes, and Zuko after her, in a dark cell under Ba Sing Sei without a door or a window or any opening but a small hole for air.

It was cold, which Katara was used to, but she didn't have her parka or a fire, so she huddled next to Zuko and his too-good-to-be-true warmth. The cell was pitch black, so she closed her eyes and pretended that she was back home and it was the longest night of winter. She pretended that she was back before, and her mother would wake her in the morning, and that there would be a morning. She dreamed that she wasn't half certain Aang was dead, that she didn't even know his name, that the Avatar was still a nameless hope that could never die. Eventually she felt the moon-power fade from her body with the coming of day, and Zuko stirred beside her. She opened her eyes, because pretending wasn't going to last her forever.

Zuko looked back at her, eyes glowing faintly like a catlynx's. He blinked slowly, coughed once. His sister hadn't done half the damage to him that she'd done to Aang, but the last lightning blast, the one Zuko had taken for her...

"I don't have any water," she murmured gingerly feeling the edges of the burn on his shoulder.

"S'okay," he muttered, and she could hear the grimace in his voice.

"No, it's not," she said. "If this gets infected-"

"Azula won't let me die like that," Zuko interrupted. "My father would never allow it." This was followed by a hollow laugh. "No, royal traitors aren't allowed to just rot away. They'll make a huge spectacle of my execution, and they need me alive for that."

"... I'm sorry."

"It's not your fault," he said with a grunt. He was sitting up, she see tell from the motion of his eyes. She sat up as well. "It's mine. If I had just come to my senses earlier..."

"You really have changed, haven't you."

"Yes."

They were silent again for a time, until Katara couldn't stand it anymore.

"I need to know I'm still alive, Zuko."

"What?"

"I- I don't know. I just... I need something, I don't know what, or I'm going to go insane down here."

He lit a fire in his palm. And she could see his face now. His features were perfectly calm, too calm. "Is that better?" he asked, looking at her intently.

"... A little."

Something flashed through his eyes, something that frightened and intrigued her. Slowly, he leaned forward, careful to keep the fire in his hand alive and away from her. Their lips met, and Katara's stomach, and regions further south, exploded with heat. Her tongue, seemingly of its own accord, forced its way into Zuko's mouth. He made a little surprised sound that only made her hotter, but then he was responding, hands threading through her hair and tongue caressing hers. When they finally broke for air Katara felt herself blushing like mad.

"I'm sorry! I'm so sorry Zuko, I don't know what came over me, I just-"

"Wanted to feel alive," he murmured, and then he was on top of her sucking on her mouth, her neck, working his way up to her ear lobe. She clung to him gasping. His right hand was caressing her side through the fabric of her dress, and his left was held out to keep the fire in it burning.

She wanted more.

Her hands were between them, pushing them apart and earning a small whine from him, and then a gasp as she pulled his tunic off so fast there was no time for it to catch fire as it flew past the flame in his hand and began running her hands over his chest.

Zuko pulled Katara close again, nuzzling into her neck and rolling them on to their sides. This had the result of putting Zuko's flaming hand behind her, but she barely noticed. She felt something hard rubbing against her crotch and suddenly she remembered Gran-Gran's lessons about men and women and where babies came from. She found she didn't care in the slightest. All she knew was that she was aching in a thousand different ways, and while she was now sure she was alive, she knew that this boy could help her be more alive, more real, than she'd ever been before.

She reached down to rub her hand against Zuko's hardness and he let out a sound somewhere between a whimper and a mewl. Katara chuckled, thinking that Zuko really was a lot like a catlynx. She rubbed him harder and he threw his head back, and opened his mouth in a silent scream.

They lay still for a moment both panting. Zuko brought his eyes back to bear on Katara's and she saw that with his pupils dilated his irises had darkened to a nearly orange color. She reached out and ran her fingers along his cheekbone.

"We... We should stop," he forced out, seeming to have difficulty forming the words. She could feel the fire at her back flickering madly.

"Why?" she asked, hand cradling the back of his neck.

He blinked at her, taking a moment to process what she had said. His answer came in the form of his mouth on hers again, his unoccupied hand reaching under her dress and pulling at the hem of her pants. She put her hand over his and together they lowered them.

His fingers were on her then, vaguely arousing until he found _something _down there that made her latch her mouth onto his bare shoulder in order not to scream.

"Sweet spirits," she whispered. She wanted him _now_. Hands on his pants, then his loincloth, then on his heat. She knew what she wanted, knew somehow what he wanted, and they gave it to each other with fumbling, learning, yearning hands. Then Zuko was inside her and she was clinging to him. He was mouthing her neck and she was scratching her nails across his back and they were pounding into each other until the flame behind her gave off a burst of heat so intense she would have screamed in fright had she no been screaming with him in something else, something wonderful. The light went out, and Zuko closed his eyes, but this time the dark around her was warm and welcoming like his arms, and even without the moon, she knew she was alive.


	2. Fear

--  
Fear

Seven times the moon has risen and seven times it has set since Katara first woke in this place. She and Zuko have only done... that once, but they've held each other nearly constantly since then. Once a day by the setting of the moon a small basket of bread and a small flask of water are lowered through the hole in the ceiling that provides them with air. There is another hole in the cell, one she hadn't noticed at first. It's in the ground, and its use is fairly obvious. If she couldn't use her waterbending to keep things relatively clean, finding it in the dark when one of them needed to make use of it would not have been a pleasant proposition. As it was, waterbending was rapidly becoming more difficult, as was staying awake for long periods of time. She just didn't have enough energy. It was the lack of food, she thought. Zuko seemed to be doing even worse than she was.

"Firebending," he said to her when she asked, "is different. You can't turn it off. You're always regulating your body temperature, at the very least. It takes a constant supply of energy."

--

"Do you think we'll ever get out of here?" she asked him when they'd been in the little cell ten days. He didn't answer.

--

Katara woke on the twelfth day to the sound of Zuko whimpering desperately and muttering incomprehensibly. She understood 'father' and 'please' and 'uncle', and she understood that he needed to be held, so she held him.

He didn't firebend at all after that.

--

They were huddled together, too tired in mind and body to do anything else, when Toph broke into their cell on the eighteenth day.


	3. Pleasure

A/N: Another month, another update. Now with Zuko POV and more than two characters, not to mention that sudden intimacy people were looking forward to.

"Pleasure"

Katara loves the sunlight on her skin: the warmth of it, the light of it, and most of all the way it makes Zuko – so pale, she had thought he was pale before but now she knows better – light up. She thinks, knowing it's silly and not caring in the slightest, that if they were in the dark she would be able to see by the light in his eyes. They're not in the dark anymore though. Thank Tui. Thank La. Thank the spirits and the gods and Toph, and Sokka who had been waiting for them in the tunnel and who is now looking at them oddly. Katara supposes they do look odd, holding each other and leaning against each other and against the wall of the abandoned farm house that they had emerged from the earth next to, laughing like they were about to die, crying like they were about to live. Her cheeks are wet with tears, as is Zuko's right one. The left side of his face is dry. She realizes that he probably can't cry with that eye.

Katara stops laughing and starts humming, an old Water Tribe song to welcome the sun back after the long winter. She holds up a shaking hand and strokes his scar from his eye to his temple. He closes both his eyes and leans into her touch, making sounds somewhere between chuckles and sobs. He pulls her hand down to his lips and mouths something into her palm.

- - - -

"I love you," he mouths because he's not quite sure, either that his voice will work after eighteen days of near silence or that it's true, though he's desperate to believe the latter, and he thinks it time it will be true, wholly and completely true as nothing in his life has been.

No, that's not right. What his uncle had said to him at the north pole, that had been true. His uncle... His eye had been beginning to dry, but now it was wet again. What would Azula do to Iroh?

"What the _fuck_!?" That was the water tribe boy. Katara's brother. Zuko's first instinct would once have been to push away from Katara. Now he grabbed her with such sudden intensity that she gasped. Zuko had thought that his weakened body was no longer capable of such strength, that fear and dark and lack of food had stolen it from him, but now he felt a different kind of fear than the fear in the dark, a fear that was fierce and angry and would do anything to keep this girl who had held him warm in the cool steel claws of the dark from being taken away from him.

"Zuko." She's talking to him. She'd spoken in the earthbender's tunnel, a few words to her brother and her friend, but she hadn't spoken to him since he'd stopped talking a few days ago. "Zuko."

He leans away from her, just far enough so that he can see her face.

"It's alright," she says, and he believes her.

"I _said_ 'what the _fuck_?'"

Zuko feels himself turning slowly red. "We were in a cave," he says. "For a long time."

"No duh," says Katara's brother dryly. "Now why are touching my sister?"

"Give it a rest, Sokka," says Katara. Sokka. His name is Sokka. Katara pulls away from him gently and stands. He struggles to his feet as well. He's being weak. He can't afford to be weak (around enemies, some part of him whispers: around anyone, he answers, except maybe her.). "You get to know people when you're alone with them for a long time."

Zuko feels himself turn even redder.

"Sugar Queen is right, Sokka," said the earthbender. "It's like the four of us." Zuko feels a pang of something unpleasant and bites his lower lip, almost drawing blood.

"A good point," Sokka says, tapping his chin. "And the things I could tell you about my boomerang..."

Zuko looks at Katara. She's smiling, bright and warm as the sun. She's home. He's lost.


End file.
